Should the launch have been delayed? What else could be done?

[Krotoan]

It's interesting how people don't view this decision as a business decision. Square enix is a company who absolutely could have decided to create a server and infrastructure base that could handle more than the number of licenses sold for their new expansion. Instead they decided...and this is really key...they decided to launch at a lower than optimal server and infrastructure base. It's not like they didn't know. I guarantee they had technical people having meetings telling them everything about this launch going bad.

It seems you aren't the one thinking of this as a business decision. It's a bad idea to invest heavily in resources that will go mainly unused yet cost a lot to maintain and run. Launch surge doesn't last. Adding enough capacity to handle it entirely is a very bad decision. If you open a new restaurant in a small town that restaurant is going to be VERY popular for maybe a month while everyone tries out the new thing, but if they keep ordering enough food to cover that level of business for YEARS, that will be a huge waste of money.

In short the idea that every mmo having this issue means it always must happen is a lie. It is instead a business decision. It is a company deciding that you will deal with this and them saving money by not having enough servers for peak, and just hanging in there. It's crap. It's been crap for every expansion that every mmo has ever had, and...this one is worse than most. They should get called out for it, and pushed to change their ways. All the excuses are just that...excuses. The truth is this doesn't need to happen, it just does to make these corporations more profit.

I bet you would run the BESTSESTSTEST MMO ever right? You would just .. magically have servers on standby, configured and running for the possibility that your player base could double or triple at ANY TIME even in a supply shortage and travel restriction period.. and no Board of Execs would ever fire you for burning hundreds of thousands of dollars on idle resources.


The bestest.


Yeh, it's for cost reasons. But it's not unreasonable to ask customers to deal with it for a short period so that a game can remain profitable for the company and as such will remain supported and available for the players.